Complete lock up while playing

[Tanner1294]

At pure random while playing the game it will completely lock up. It doesn't seem to be from anything specific in the game like an event occurring or a character loading, it just happens. The last time it happened I peeked around a corner and pbbt, it froze. And when I say froze, I mean it completely locks up the entire bloody computer forcing me to shut it down by holding the power button.
I read somewhere that PPC Macs are hit and miss with this game because of issues with the graphics card drivers? Is this being worked on? It seemed like the guy was blaming Apple for not updating the drivers but this is the only game/app/whatever that has this issue so I highly doubt that Apple's completely at fault here..
Anyone have a fix to this or some more info at least? I'd really like to play the game...

So here are the specs:
2005 PowerBook G4 15"
1.5 ghz G4
2 gigs of RAM
ATI 9770 Radeon Mobility with 64 megs of VRAM.

[Urkle]

It actually is because the apple drivers are old, and that card is on the bottom rung of supported video cards. The OpenGL drivers in leopard are only at 2.0 for SOME cards. And really Amnesia needs 2.1 which is provided only by snow leopard and higher. Also Amnesia is using some more advanced functionality that probably every other PPC game you have aren't using.. Specifically Occlusion queries, and a LOT of them.

As I was testing on 17" version of your powerbook it would continually run into infinite loops in the game due to the occlusion queries results just wouldn't return.

Unfortunately Apple has nailed the coffin on PPC Mac's, there just isn't much that can be done. There are bugs in their snow leopard drivers they just plain don't want to fix (e.g. improperly implemented GLSL specifications, BAD performance on Nvidia 7300 cards). Things have improved since Steam for Mac came out, but it's only affected things a little on snow leopard and a significant amount on lion (Lion finally implements OpenGL 3.2, even though the latest is 4.2)

[Tanner1294]

It actually is because the apple drivers are old, and that card is on the bottom rung of supported video cards. The OpenGL drivers in leopard are only at 2.0 for SOME cards. And really Amnesia needs 2.1 which is provided only by snow leopard and higher. Also Amnesia is using some more advanced functionality that probably every other PPC game you have aren't using.. Specifically Occlusion queries, and a LOT of them.

As I was testing on 17" version of your powerbook it would continually run into infinite loops in the game due to the occlusion queries results just wouldn't return.

Unfortunately Apple has nailed the coffin on PPC Mac's, there just isn't much that can be done. There are bugs in their snow leopard drivers they just plain don't want to fix (e.g. improperly implemented GLSL specifications, BAD performance on Nvidia 7300 cards). Things have improved since Steam for Mac came out, but it's only affected things a little on snow leopard and a significant amount on lion (Lion finally implements OpenGL 3.2, even though the latest is 4.2)

Hmm... so once again I am left at an impasse with this computer. I love it to death and PowerPC is still pretty powerful but it's been left in the dust left and right the past few years from small to large apps. More importantly games. I was actually very surprised to find that the demo was a Universal Binary in the first place because especially newer games are flat out Intel only which is something I can't and won't be able to afford for years to come. I've got a PC too but at 1.46ghz Dual Core with an Intel GMA 965 Chipset it won't run Amnesia hardly at all.
So there's no chance of this getting worked around in development (not to sound ignorant with the whole "can't you just fix it?" statement) at some point in the future? It's a shame because this game is really well designed, even with graphics being their completely lowest settings it still gives a chilling atmosphere I haven't found in games.

R.I.P. PPC.